Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Kristina,

I would say that while having both terms in the URL is good, there are _so _man more important places for those terms to be used, and so many more important ways in which they can be used to ensure that your site (and the right content) ranks for [marketing success] that you needn't worry about URL structure. The content of those two areas of your site and how they relate to each other are much more important.

Hi Lee,

Pages like this often show the same or similar metrics, but it's still best practice to have only one version resolve so I would still either canonicalise with the canonical tag or use 301 redirects, yes.

Hi there,

I can't give you a definite answer, but one theory that could work out would be Google counting visits from third party sites that use Bing/Yahoo as their search engine provider, while Bing WMT is only reporting traffic that has come through Bing.com or Yahoo's actual search engine web interfaces. For example, Facebook's web search is powered by bing: http://i.imgur.com/wFvcXHS.png

Given your situation, do you think this could make up quite a substantial amount of traffic, or does this sound unlikely for your specific website?

Hi Karl,

Have the tags been implemented, and have you seen any improvement in the situation?

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but I had a client accidentally canonicalise two entire websites to those website's home pages in 2012. That is, www.site.com/page/product/123.html contained a canonical tag pointing to www.site.com, as did every other page on the website. They put this live across two ecommerce domains.

We kicked up a huge fuss, but it still took their dev team a week to fix (the fix was put into a queue... grr). The site lost all of its rankings very quickly, which wasn't surprising given that its ranking all stemmed from internal pages ranking for products. It took about six weeks for Google to properly re-index and start ranking the internal pages again, and months to return to the previous rankings. Granted, these sites were quite new when this happened so they didn't have much authority to begin with.

The short version is that it took a minute to break, six days to fix and six weeks to re-index. Every single case like this will be different, and I do not think the brand-new status of the two domains helped in this case.

Hi there,

There's a bunch of conflicting information floating around about this, but the last thing I read from Google was that they no longer recommended using the canonical tag when implementing hreflang: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

See the greyed / crossed-out section and the note underneath.

It was super helpful of them to not announce this in any way, but just edit that article. Keep in mind that the original was written in 2011, of course...

Hi Jason,

I would definitely not canonicalise between the three+ URLs about one text unless those URLs contain identical information. Since they won't be identical (one will be plot, one characters, etc. as you say earlier in the thread), I would not canonicalise. You will result in content such as that on characters not being indexed or crawled. The site is therefore probably less likely to rank for queries like [othello characters] if the characters page has a canonical tag on it, pointing to the plot summary page.

Without having seen the site or mock-ups, I believe you would be safe to use separate URLs for each area of study surrounding one topic.

However, you could indeed put all this content on one page and use tabs to switch between the content, given that it is too long to fit nicely on one page. The tabs should be operated by CSS, and all the text (plot summary, characters, context) would be in the source code upon page load. People would click between tabs to read it. This is not considered cloaking or hiding content, although I would avoid doing this if the content for each section is particularly lengthy. I doubt it would get you in trouble, but if you are creating substantial content for each area of study, this would work well on separate URLs _without _canonicalising to one particular page, as per your original structure.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Thomas,

I think your problem is partially duplicate content:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Once+you%E2%80%99re+approved+for+a+ReebokONE+profile+and+you+sign+up+for+the+commission+program%2C+visitors+can+purchase+products+displayed+on+your%22&oq=%22Once+you%E2%80%99re+approved+for+a+ReebokONE+profile+and+you+sign+up+for+the+commission+program%2C+visitors+can+purchase+products+displayed+on+your%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.1682j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8#filter=0&q=%22Once+you%E2%80%99re+approved+for+a+ReebokONE+profile+and+you+sign+up+for+the+commission+program%2C+visitors+can+purchase+products+displayed+on+your%22&safe=off

This page is virtually identical to a bunch of others in international subfolders, e.g. http://www.reebok.com/sv-SE/reebokonehome/Landing-Page/, http://www.reebok.com/sv-SE/reebokonehome/ (same page but without /Landing-Page/, http://www.reebok.com/nl-nl/reebokonehome/, etc.

It's highly unlikely that Google sees any of these resources as highly valuable on their own, given their duplicated many times. The solution here is pretty simple (in theory) though: the rel="alternative" tag (also referred to as the href lang tag) is meant for the purpose of telling Google that although these pages / subfolders, etc. are duplicates of each other, Version A is meant for the US, Version B for Sweden, Version C for Finland, etc. You can also create, for example, an English and Spanish version of the content for the United States and say: "these two pages are for a US audience but this one is for Spanish queries and this one for English."

Here are some resources about the tag:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool

Essentially, Google may be refusing to pick this page up because it's basically already seen it many, many times.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Echoing William about not wanting to step on another's business, but on-page content creation is virtually indistinguishable from the process of creating internal links, in my opinion as an SEO and as someone with a background in writing / publishing. They're generally worked into copy naturally, then site structure (which should have been covered in the site audit) would cover issues like navigational linking.

I worked in the sales section of my former agency for the last year I was there (former SEO consultant for them, now back to freelancing) and we certainly never broke anything down like this.

What I did find, however, was that larger clients (think corporate giants) want break-downs of everything cost-wise when proposing work. They want to know what the individual cost of writing pages, removing links, even the cost of a consultant's time to monitor tools on a monthly basis. However, adding invoices for things after the fact was clearly a big no-no. The retainer or full cost was stated up front (e.g. $10,000 per month) and then a breakdown was shown, rather than work beginning and then me saying, "Oh, so it's going to be another $2k for X, Y and Z."

I can see something like the cost of rewiring internal links being included in a breakdown like this, but if I were writing a quote for re-working the on-page elements of a website, it would certainly not come with an extra invoice for internal links.

$20,000 for an initial phase of work before link dev is understandable if you were on a monthly retainer of $10,000 and a massive amount of initial work was put into the campaign - this is the sort of fee I used to be working with when at an agency. But with that fee came a culture of all-inclusiveness. Everything from site audits to link audits and take-downs, social media audit, 12 - 24 month strategy, staff training, tool access, etc. came included.

Short version: I'd not be a fan of including these costs after work has started, rather than the company saying: "This is going to cost you $40,000 over six months" and showing the breakdown of where that money is spent. I also personally find the cost of placing internal links to be a natural part of both the site audit and copywriting, so am confused about why that's separate.

Hi there,

If you 301 to https://www.mysite.com/, the authority of **http://**www.mysite.com/ will be largely attributed to the HTTPS version. That is, all the links (anchor text, etc.) pointing to the non-HTTPS version will help the HTTPS version rank well. There may be some dilution along the way, but you will not lose the benefit of those links simply because the HTTPS version is canonical and a 301 is in place.

You can feel free to specify the https version in WMT as a result. In fact, there have been murmurings that several Google employees favour HTTPS sites, but we are a long way from that being a recommendation. It's just now much more safe to say that using HTTPS is safe (it used to present some ranking / crawling issues). http://searchengineland.com/ranking-benefit-making-site-ssl-yet-googles-cutts-like-make-happen-186810

Hi Doug,

Ah - sorry, I misunderstood about the links disappearing and the rankings suffering on the same day. I am not sure how quickly Ahrefs updates - it might be slightly quicker than Moz, but we're still talking a possible couple of weeks in between. That would be enough to cause rankings and traffic to go down if those links, despite being dynamically generated, were helping before.

Is the significant improvement in traffic coming with improved rankings that you can track? It's incredibly frustrating to have lost keyword data in times like this - you're relying on the rankings you're already tracking through tools like Moz to see which keywords are on the rise...

Hi Syed,

I definitely agree that the second URL looks too spammy - especially because some of those areas of London are nowhere near each other (Hertfordshire is about an hour away from the "City of London" - an area in East London - and the demographics of each area are astoundingly different!).

Without having seen the pages live, I would probably 301 the second page with the longer URL to the first page, or break out the services offered in different parts of the area to showcase people working in Hertfordshire, the City, etc. If there was enough original content, you could have a page for different areas. My guess is that there is no difference, however, or that there would not be enough different information to justify regional pages - that the page is for one business targeting multiple areas. If so, go with the redirection option.

David's right, unfortunately - even in the insurance industry, you see sites pop in and out, beating the big aggregators and private companies for short periods. It doesn't happen very often anymore with the blue-chip terms ([car insurance], [health insurance], etc.) but for the second-tier you can still see examples like this. Google isn't perfect at killing spam yet.

Keep in mind that some of the big algo updates regarding links in the past two years have not really been targeting spammers at all: they have been targeting otherwise legitimate businesses (from large corporations to "mom & pop shop" organisations) who've sought to use manipulative link dev tactics. The tactics that a lot of recent manual and algorithmic penalties have focused on are buying into link networks and schemes rather than outright automated, old-fashioned spam. You can still get rankings with blackhat / greyhat tactics and some of those rankings last a surprisingly long time.

I am not saying that the sites above are outright spam at all - they are affiliates who'll get burned in the end if their strategies aren't watertight, and they all seem to be owned by QuoteSearcher Ltd. Even the big guys in insurance get burned regularly - I'll stay away from citing actual examples due to past experience with agency-based client work, but big brands would rise and fall all the time during the five years I worked in insurance SEO.

Hi Nick,

I would be wary with the "powered by" links - they aren't Google's most loved method of link building and they're astonishingly easy to detect, for obvious reasons. You will see a lot of historical links using this sort of method, including links to established brands ("email marketing by X", for example, under every newsletter sign-up box - links go to the business responsible for providing the email marketing software). Established brands often get away with having older links in their profiles like this, but given Google's very strong crack-down on link building methods in 2013 / 14, I would not engage in this as a new tactic.

It falls into widget-based link building, which Google first publicly cracked down on in 2008. Although you wouldn't be doing anything like what was done in this example, Google's hasn't really liked this tactic for quite some time. This is assuming that the tool or a badge about the tool sat somewhere search engine-indexable, of course.

Hi Luke,

As alrockn says, I would redirect the root domain of the duplicate blog to mainsite.com/blog.

With the pages that have no duplicate on the main site, either find the likeliest match or redirect to mainsite.com/blog. When I say likeliest match, I mean that if any pages on the old blog seem a good fit with something on the main site, redirect them there. You may find none that fit any of the existing pages. If so, don't worry - I'd redirect those to the main site's blog.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Doug,

Checking in on this one - has there been any change in the traffic, or have you uncovered any more information (especially regarding any other updates that might have affected the site) that could have had an effect during that time?

Losing a large chunk of links can hurt a site, but it would be incredibly quick for the link loss and traffic loss to happen on the same day. It would take Google the day to note that all 17k links were gone, then you're probably looking at a number of days for that to actually play out in search results.

Hi,

Our understanding is that the first link found in the code will "count" as far as the passing of PageRank and the anchor text used. The other links on the page will likely be used to count towards the total links on the page, meaning that there could be some "dilution", but as alrockn says - this set-up is very common for e-commerce and should not mean that you are actively harming the distribution of PageRank throughout the site or to the individual product pages.

Hi Prashant,

I find that some of these are indexed whilst other are not. An example of a URL listed in the initial site search that won't appear for a site: search of its own is here.

I agree with Michael that your "not found" pages may be part of the problem, even though they are not returning 404s. They should be returning 404s, or at least more information about why the query "activity based classes" near the location returns no results, and what else people can look for / search for within your site instead.

The characters may also be causing a problem with Google not recognising the site: search as being the same as the given URL.

Hi,

Andy says, there is no magical number for this. We just can't say.

The "100 links per page" advice stems from statements made in 2009, 2010 - Matt Cutts has recently said that this limit no longer applies: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-we-dropped-the-100-links-per-page-guideline-but-we-may-take-action-if-it-is-too-spammy-178197

That post and its video are probably the closest you will get to a clear answer on this. There was another thread more recently (2014) where this is further confirmed but I am having trouble finding it.

Hi Gavin,

Agree with Martijn here - links from 404ing pages are very unlikely to either help or hinder a website, just as inbound links to pages on your site that 404 also don't help / hurt.

You probably do not need to do anything about these links. However, if they were very good links in the past and you would like them back, you could consider contacting the webmasters of the sites with the broken pages and asking them if they are aware of their errors and / or would consider updating.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Edmond,

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "2 - 3 filters" please? Do you mean something like choosing "bathroom" under "Space" and ending up with a URL like http://www.wayfair.com/Shop-The-Look/Bathroom/space?

Thanks,

Jane

Hi Zack,

Just checking in to see if you had run any other tests to determine why this message might have appeared (e.g. a site crawl to find duplication / bad canonicalisation, etc.)? Let me know if you still need assistance.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Kelli,

From what you have described here, I don't think this will easily be crawled. Obviously the necessary code for the click activity is included in the HTML, and whilst Google has been known to complete forms and take actions on sites before, it's far from guaranteed that it will do this.

Usually when Google completes actions like this, it's not desirable - you used to see websites with millions of junk URLs indexed because Google had either "filled out forms" itself, or spammers had dynamically generated millions of versions of a form to fill Google's index, in order to harm a competitor. It's not common to want Google to complete activity like this, rather than just let it crawl the information deliberately given to it in HTML.

I would be really curious to see what the menus looked like in HTML though. That would give us a better idea of whether it's likely Google will crawl any of the content.

If the menus are not crawlable, there are range of other good options (that can also be user-friendly and attractive) for menu development. The Distilled guide is a good resource.

If we are I am able to look at the raw HTML for the planned menus, please let me know. If you'd rather not post it in here, feel free to PM me (I am not a Moz staff member - I used to be - but I act as an associate contractor for the company) or email jane.copland@gmail.com.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Chris,

Correct me if this information is outdated, but Open Site Explorer sees no inbound links pointing to the site. Ahrefs (a similar tool) sees <a>two</a>. Along with David's points about on-site optimisation, this is a big problem - even with all the changes Google has made in the past couple of years regarding site quality, links are still a very important part of the ranking algorithm. It's very hard to rank well without quality inbound links from third party websites.

I would look seriously into link development - the link building section of this blog is a great resource for ideas and current practices.

Hi Cindy,

Checking in to see if you removed the robots.txt blocking of the old URLs. When you put 301s in place, generally that is all that is needed to show Google that one URL has moved to another - blocking in robots.txt increases the likelihood that Google won't pick this up or ignore it. Blocking the old URLs tells Google to not access any of the information on the page (it doesn't actually tell Google not to index the URL, just to not read or index any of the content on the URL, hence why you sometimes see robots.txt-blocked URLs ranking, but with no cached information.

A 301 redirect is done by the server, not information on the page itself, but it's still inadvisable to block URLs you'd otherwise want crawled for their 301s this way.

Please also make sure someone noted domain change in Webmaster Tools as Donna says. You can do this in the WMT interface and it helps inform Google that the change was made in full, that it was deliberate and completed by the site's regular owner.

My money is on the robots.txt exclusion too -  changing from an older, stronger domain to one that is a little weaker should not hurt particularly if everything else is done right.

Best,

Jane

Hi Taysir,

Going on Google's wording, that blog post is correct - you do come across instances of people claiming disavowal has worked well when they've disavowed links they weren't responsible for building. The problem is convincing Google that you weren't responsible ("_If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action" - _there's a possibility that you can claim until you are blue in the face that you were not behind the links Google dislikes, and they still refuse to lift a penalty).

I would go for a reconsideration request first if I were you, as the blog post recommends. I also consider disavowal a last resort when link removal fails - it was foreseeable that people would disavow without doing any other work (and I'm sure Google saw that coming too). For context, at my former agency we would spend months removing every bad link we could find for new clients before filing for reconsideration or using disavowal. One came to us with over 7,000 bad links in early 2013; we removed and removed and finally had the penalty lifted later in the year (it was worth it - it was a high-value domain otherwise).

Explain everything you have done or tried to do in the reconsideration request. Be honest but as concise as possible, and cite your actions with things like spreadsheets of sites researched / contacted / failed to respond.

In short, that blog post is also how we dealt with disavowal at my old agency. I'm sure it works for some people who disavow things they weren't responsible for, but the misuse I have seen of the tool is also really high. One person told me once they had disavowed one link in their backlink profile "to test impact." Ah... that's not what it's for.

The guys all have some great thoughts here.

One more thought:

If a promotion or product is usually short-lived but comes back intermittently (e.g. once a year, twice a year, etc.), the URL can be kept live. A good example is rental real estate in a big city - the properties will come back on the market, but the URLs need to show visitors that the apartment is not available at the moment. RIghtmove (real estate in the UK) does this with rentals it knows will come back on the market, e.g. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-21907128.html

They re-use the pages when the property is live again - I've seen them do it with both flats I lived in, and they rank remarkably well. Questionable usability if a page ranks and is actually unavailable, but effective.

Clearly this is only relevant if you will re-use / open these short-term promotions in the future.

There is honestly no need to worry about having "no keywords" in a post. Google is much more sophisticated than that - and besides, a post like:

"today I went out on a 16 mile bike ride over the chilterns using my Garmin 705, After the first 8 miles I used my hydropak and then continued on up the 3 mile incline which was helped by the quickshift speedwheel, I find that with all riding my ipod helps me and when I finally reached mile point I stopped and refilled the hydropak. "

... includes a whole lot of keywords relevant to cycling, location, accessories, etc. The internet and Google's index would be a very small place if it discredited websites with small entries or entries without keyword-rich text, as well.

I can't imagine a world in which these would hurt you in the slightest.

Hi Sara,

Following up on this one - has there been a real drop in rankings that you have verified?

That would point the most authority at the home page, but isn't the best user experience. Our concern is that Google monitors how people use 301s in terms of how it affects user experience and whether the redirection was done purely for SEO purposes. However, if you can do that without confusion, it would be a good option.

Hi,

Adam is correct that the disavow tool should only be used if you think the links are causing you significant ranking problems. It's become quite common for people to disavow links without either a confirmed penalty or ranking issues, but those two factors were originally how Google recommended the tool be used.

What it sounds like has happened to your site with these bad pages is that spammers have created spam pages on the wiki then pointed links to those pages from elsewhere. It's a very common and old spam tactic, used on sites that allow UGC.

Those pages are now returning 404s, so technically the inbound links pointing to them should not hurt your website or cause a penalty. It's generally assumed the links to 404 pages (good or bad links) don't hurt or help. I disagree that they'll cause a "bad user experience" as it sounds like they have been built for spam purposes only - no one is going to try and visit these links.

If you believe these links are causing a ranking issue, the disavowal tool is certainly an option - I take it there's no chance you can negotiate these links' removal with the folks who built them? Removing links is always preferable to using disavowal also.

Hi Soren,

If I were going to redirect internally (i.e. remove the brands, sub-categories and products but not redirect those pages to xxx.com), I'd consider creating a page on a new URL on superstar.dk, explaining why the pages are gone and linking to xxx.com. This won't confuse users, but will keep the authority of those redirected pages within the old domain.

If I were going to redirect to the new site, I would clearly do as you've mentioned above, redirecting www.superstar.dk/product1.html to www.xxx.com/product1.html and so forth.

I would definitely go for a combination of descriptive for users and descriptive for bots, in that you're not losing valuable real estate in your title tags but you're not misleading anyone as to what is on the page. In general, you can create very well-optimised titles for SEO purposes without compromising usability - a title tag that simply reads "The Boston" isn't nearly as user-friendly as a title that says (for instance) "Modern black leather sectional Boston sofa with bookcase" (totally made up example using your title from above). The second is better for SEO and for human users - it's actually remarkably common how those two things are one in the same, given that Google wants to return results that are best for users

Hi again,

Are you aware that you have a canonical tag on http://cheaptubes.com that points to a non-existent URL? i.e. http://i.imgur.com/yEd2377.png

http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.html

If http://cheaptubes.com/ 301 redirected to http://www.cheaptubes.com/, this would resolve the issue.

Are you aware that the www version of your site shows for a brand search (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cheaptubes.com&oq=cheaptubes.com&aqs=chrome..69i58j69i60l2j69i57j69i60j0.3367j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8) but that the canonical tags on each page point to the non-www version, e.g. http://i.imgur.com/P7Tizsv.png and http://i.imgur.com/lhTA95w.png?

The canonical tag on the www.cheaptubes.com/ page also points to http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.html. Sorry to show so many errors, but it doesn't look like canonicalisation has been implemented properly here.

A 401 is 'unauthorized' - is that the code it would produce, or a different error (or a typo!)?

That could work in theory - I'd be a bit hesitant about the extra step involved in 301ing to get to an error page on a different site. In general, the fewer steps you make Google go through, the better. This method would mean that your new site should not be "credited" with the bad links, however.

I would agree with Rishi that redirecting between domains can be a little bit troublesome - it should make a lot of sense, but it's a tactic that has been abused for spam / low quality purposes in the past, and any tactic that has been abused is likely to be scrutinised at some point.

Ignoring potential future issues for a second, I would also say that whether to redirect or not depends on your goals. If you wish to pass all the authority from a well-established, well-ranked existing site (superstar.dk) and move the brand (besides the small niche you'll keep), redirection could be very helpful. If you don't want to remove any equity from superstar.dk, redirection to the home page or to a page explaining the site's changes + linking to the new website, could be good too.

I understand your concern, and in that light I would file the disavowal, but even very poor-quality, over-optimised links that point to your domain should not incur a penalty if the pages they link to are 404s or 410s. All the same, I obviously can't guarantee this so the disavowal would be a good move.

Hi Mike,

Are you saying that there is a canonical tag on http://cheaptubes.com/cntmaterialsafetydatasheet.htm, pointing to http://www.cheaptubes.com/cntmaterialsafetydatasheet.htm? This would solve the duplicate content problem, but I do not see a canonical tag on either of those pages...

Hi again,

Four months seems abnormally long, but it could have something to do with how many 404s are are - 400 is pretty high. Is this number at least going down every few weeks in WMT?

Cheers,

Jane

Closing this particular thread as it's a duplicate - answers going up on the other thread.

Hi there,

I'm going to disagree that this is a Panda issue unless those links + 301s were creating duplication, loops etc. on your site. If I'm reading this correctly, your problem is links from bad sites pointing to your site, albeit through 301 redirects - Panda deals with on-site issues and Penguin / manual penalties with off-site. Is this the issue, or are there on-site issues that this has created? Keep in mind that a drop in rankings that coincides with a Panda update isn't necessarily because of the Panda update.

As far as removing the effects of the bad links goes, sending bad-quality inbound links to 404 or 410 pages should remove them from consideration as far as Google's view of your backlink profile is concerned. That is, an inbound link pointing to yoursite.com/page.html where /page.html returns a 404 or 410 should ensure that that link doesn't hurt you. If, however, you are still concerned, go ahead and submit a disavow file with these links included.

Hi,

If you configure your drop-down menus for SEO by using the correct CSS technique (i.e. the links appear on the page but are activated with a hover, which I am sure you're referring to), this is fine for SEO purposes. Best to avoid hundreds and hundreds of links in drop-down menus (they can get cumbersome and bad for usability, and dilute the passed authority). If it's best for usability to have a huge drop-down but link numbers are concern, some sites use JavaScript for links that aren't important for SEO on "mega menus".

As a basic rule though, you will not suffer by having some navigational links in CSS-led drop downs.

Hi,

If the notice was revoked due to you nofollowing the bad outbound links, this means that a penalty has been lifted. However, there could be other issues affecting the site that have caused its drop - ranking 8th is not an indication of a penalty - penalised websites tend to rank a lot worse than this.

The inbound links Marie has cited could be part of the problem, even though you have not received a warning about them. If they are no longer helping (but were helping back when Google's standards were a little lower), then it's feasible Google has raised the rankings of other websites over yours, even though their Moz metrics have not yet caught up.

Hi there,

This should be fairly easy as it's Wordpress to Wordpress. Does this page answer the question properly for you? https://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content

You will want to 301 redirect the old blog to the new one once you are done, ensuring that this is done on a page by page basis (e.g. www.oldblog.com/post123.html redirects to blog.newdomaincom/post123.html).

You will probably need to do this in your .htaccess file if the site is hosted on an Apache server. It will probably look like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Hi,

Whether you report this or not is up to you - there's always been a lot of debate in SEO circles about whether it's a good idea to do this or not but the end of the story is pretty much that it's up to you.

The technical answer to the question is that yes, soliciting links with products is directly frowned upon. Plenty of people still basically do this but in a more subtle manner, where they are "developing a relationship" first, often not directly asking for a link. Products for publicity is an ancient trick which Google won't get rid of, but they definitely can and do say that they aren't happy with a direct exchange.

Hi there,

Check out Wordpress's page on importing old content as well. The Wordpress information is towards the bottom of the page (there are instructions for a bunch of other blogging platforms). As jStrong said, this will be easier if you are importing to a new Wordpress installation rather than to a different CMS.

Hi Cole,

Unfortunately there is a solution for this for international duplication but not national. If we were talking about international locations, the solution is the hreflang tag. I'll link to it here just in case it's of use in the future: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Nationally, canonicalisation will remove the non-canonical versions from the index and of course from rankings, as Chris has said.

I've looked at medical queries in the past, and Google is very adept at taking IP into account when returning results, the fact that it thinks my IP is located an hour's drive south of here notwithstanding

I would say that re-written content is your best bet if you can't use one page listing multiple locations (highly unlikely) and truly need separate sites for all 13. There can be a little cross-over / duplication without causing too much worry, but I would be concerned that Google is not good enough at a national level to differentiate between duplicates in the same way it can do this for internationalisation.

Hi there,

In order to reduce the risk of passing the penalty but to ensure customers and repeat visitors get from site A to site B, you can try a 302 redirect, a meta refresh or a JavaScript redirect. Google traditionally does not pass authority or anything else through these types of redirects; however, there have been discussions lately in the SEO community about these types of redirects possibly carrying penalties over to the new domain as well.

However, I'd still say they're safer than a 301 if you ONLY want to take traffic with you, but essentially want to start afresh.

Cheers,

Jane